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Through plenty, lose in morals what they gain
In manners – victims of luxurious ease.
It is a Protestant viewpoint not entirely dead today.
From the discoveries, from the debates, new sciences sprang. ‘Geography is a science of fact,’ said Bougainville, knowing he challenged an older and contradictory point of view. The depressing story of Tasmania – its history of the slaughter of the indigenous population boding ill for the inhabitants of any possible future planet any possible future space-travellers might come across – is lightened only by the French expedition there in 1802, when François Péron made the first anthropological record. Péron established amiable relations with the Tasmanians, and brought back to Europe 100,000 animal specimens, of which 2500 were of unknown species. Numerous meetings with the inhabitants were faithfully recorded.
All such findings were closely linked to the continuing search for the nature of man. Péron himself, addressing the French authorities, declared, ‘No doubt it is wonderful to gather the inert moss which grows on the eternal ice of the Poles, or to pursue into the burning heart of the Sahara those hideous reptiles which Nature seems to have exiled in order to protect us from their fury; but – let us have the courage to say it – would it be less wonderful, less useful to society, to send with the naturalists on this mission some young doctors specially trained in the study of man himself, to record everything of interest in both moral and physical matters which diverse peoples may have to reveal – their habitat, their traditions, their customs, their maladies both internal and external, and the cures which they use?’
The study of man himself. It was a sensible and enlightened goal. Yet, only a year after the French expedition to Tasmania, the British established a penal colony there. The wretched Tasmanians were then hunted to death, suffering alike at the hands of criminals and philanthropists. All became extinct within thirty years. The unfittest had not survived. Neither the most enlightened statesmen, nor all the rococo in all the churches in Europe could stem a general extermination.
Ideas or ideologies always arise which cushion us from clear perceptions of our own cruelty; the Victorians took refuge in a popular view of Darwinism, garbled in a loose phrase, ‘the survival of the fittest’; the Nazis believed they were ridding the German race of impurity by massacring six million Jews; Stalinists justified the Great Purge by their sterile belief in the entrails of Marx and Lenin; and the West turned a blind eye to the killing of perhaps a million Chinese in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966 because the victims were labelled Communist.
Despite the slaughters, the findings brought back by British and French three-masters stimulated a debate on the nature of man and his place in the universe which still continues. The slow, creaking three-masters have been replaced by speedy surrealist kitchen utensils cutting up the sky. The findings of Mariner spacecraft, with their startling crop of pictures, the harvest from Pioneers, Vikings and Voyagers, give impetus to the quest for extraterrestrial life. But our modern findings are undoubtedly less corporeal: eighteenth-century sailors copulated on warm sands with the dusky ladies of the South Seas in exchange for nails. The rewards of technology were never better or more immediately demonstrated.
The more efficiently the early engines could be seen to work, the faster they multiplied. The faster they multiplied, the more dominant they became. It was like a re-run of the story of prehistoric reptiles. Samuel Butler observed this phenomenon clearly and, in Erewhon (1872), gives one of his scribes this ominous sentence: ‘The present machines are to the future as the early Saurians are to man.’ The argument goes on, ‘I would repeat that I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present.’
Butler’s fear was not a particularly common one, judging by the success of technology. When Cook was killed in 1779, Britain was rapidly becoming covered with a network of canals – the first modern transport system, the biggest thing since Roman roads. Soon no major city lay farther than fifteen miles from a busy water link. In another generation, the new roads had arrived; 1600 Road Acts went through Parliament between 1751 and 1790. On new roads, new light coaches – a new thing; all classes could afford to travel. And in a further generation, at the moment when coaching had reached its zenith of speed and organisation, in came the men from the North with their railways, and swept into darkness with a vast exhalation of coal smoke, the slow moving past.
When the painter J. M. W. Turner, born as the American War of Independence began, died in 1851, the Western world had undergone one of its greatest periods of transition – and was undergoing another.
New landscapes required new perceptions. The interpretation by trained artists of those exotic panoramas first sighted over the taffrail of the Endeavour or the Bounty led to the overthrow of a classical generalised style of art in favour of the art of the closely studied and the particular. This is what Ruskin means when he says in Modern Painters, apropos of Turner, that, ‘For the better comfort of the non-imaginative painter, be it observed, that it is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture.’ So Zoffany and Reynolds give place to Constable and Ward, and early Turner to late.
The earthworks thrown up all over England to accommodate the railway line left their mark in the minds of men. When Brunel built his Great Western Railway from Paddington to Bristol, the comparative feebleness of his steam-power meant that the track had to run level to within 1/12,000th of an inch for the whole hundred-mile journey. One can see Brunel’s cuttings still, guarding the line up the Thames valley to Oxford. There lie the chalk strata, put down millions of years ago by minute creatures, brought back to the grimy light of day a century ago by sturdy Victorian navvies.
A cardinal perception dawned: that the rocks of old Earth, or the coral islands of the new oceans, were petrified Time. It was almost but not quite what Burnet meant when he said: ‘We have still the broken materials of that first world, and walk upon its ruins.’ Embalmed in gritty streets lay secrets of past history just as urgent as a journey from Birmingham to Liverpool. Understanding lent a window on epochs long past and on times to come.
Geology was in many ways the giant, the Prometheus, of nineteenth-century science, bursting open the other doors of the cultural gallery. It is a curious linkage of the physical and the metaphysical to think of the poor stonemason, Hugh Miller, chopping away in the dust of the red sandstones of Scotland, and thereby helping to sketch that teeming pageant of organic life we now accept without blinking: that pageant which belongs with amino acids in a nameless ocean, and the first single-celled creatures, and which swells in grandeur and colour and possibly hideousness through the ages of amphibians and rampant trees and great dinosaurs that walked like men, on to the dodo and to Us, going about our archaic rituals. That pageant is among the most permanent to emerge from the permanent ways of the Railway Age.
Almost all that we can learn or imagine is inherited, the produce of the labours of others. So it always was. Aided by the work of Miller, and of Lyell and James Hutton and Wallace and others, Charles Darwin pieced together the jigsaw of facts which form evolutionary theory. Darwin’s researches took him many years; they began when Captain Fitzroy, a godfearing sailor, had the misfortune to take Darwin aboard the Beagle.
The voyage of the Beagle was almost as momentous as that of the Endeavour; its findings concluded part of the debate opened up by Cook. No longer ‘in doubt to deem himself a God or Beast’, man now saw himself ranged with the animals rather than the angels. Theology was never to be as popular again; but zoology won many adherents.
The early geologists learnt to distinguish between rocks of a sedimentary character and rocks formed by what Darwin calls plutonian processes. One wonders how far this dramatic inorganic model of rock-formation influenced that other great iconoclast of last century’s thought, Sigmund Freud, when formulating his theories of conscious and unconscious, from which latter well up the raw lavas of the personality’s core.
Whilst new cosmologies were discovered in the heavens – the first star photographs were taken in the 1850s – the earth yielded immense troves of dinosaur bones, notably in North America, like strange stations on the route of the railroad. Students of both Earth and sky helped roll back the carpet of the globe’s prehistory. The consequent development of scientific understanding, which takes in first one discipline and then another, creating channels of fresh thought like a flood inundating a parched land, has structured our mental frontiers; we abandon its watchtowers for superstitious faiths at our peril. Yet ours is an age easily tempted towards the mysticism of drugs and the bending of spoons by telepathy – not least because last century’s advances opened the doors of lunatic asylums as the complex nature of human mentality was unlocked, leaving us heir to a lessened fear of madness.
Whichever way we go, we see strange panoramas. As far as we can know, our vision is unique in the universe. And mankind is at present only at the beginning of its corporate lifetime.
Decade by decade, more time was needed in which to contain scientific findings related to the age of the Earth, and to cosmology. The good Bishop Ussher’s estimate that God created the world one morning in 4004 BC was laughable by Lyell’s time – the iguanodon upset that tea party. Just as men looked back to a truer perspective, other findings encouraged them to look forward. That was a new thing, too.
Not all that was new was of a sort to induce optimism. Though evolution could be made to stand as a justification for ruthless economic oppression or empire-building, it does not, on a proper evaluation, encourage any permanent feeling of security. The same might be said of Lord Kelvin’s reformulation of the second Law of Thermodynamics, which carried with it intimations of the heat death of the universe. Utilitarianism was a bleak enough creed for men; how much worse to find it written in the stars themselves.
As for a work designed to counterbalance the optimism of the Enlightenment, Malthus’s influential Essay on Population, its message that poverty and starvation, and more poverty and starvation, was mankind’s lot, added little to the gaiety of nations. Fortunately, in the New World, the wide prairies of the Mid-West seemed to give the lie to Malthus; in many ways, the United States could escape from the gloomy prognostications of Europe.
In Europe, the century culminated in a general pessimism (brought on, it must be added, by a series of dire events, revolutions and wars, as much as by depressing books). Great inventions, too, brought inventive whispers of mortality. I mentioned photography in my introduction. Photography brings us news of distant places; it sometimes appears, through the medium of the cinema screen, to bring us light itself, clothed in images of majestic beauty. Yet its primary use – at least among ordinary people – is to record ourselves and our families, and thus to expose as never before the ageing process, the heat death of the individual, to the very generations who have lost belief in the consolations of the Hereafter.
Photography is comfortless (Susan Sontag has recently made perceptive remarks on this score). It gives a twist to the Enlightenment philosopher Berkeley’s new theory of vision. ‘The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived,’ said Berkeley. Now we have become so enslaved by our cameras that we hardly exist unless we have been perceived by the lens; I have known functions to be called off because the television cameras were not coming – therefore the event was not important enough, even in the eyes of its participants, and ceased to exist.
In the nineteenth century, as now, the sketchy frameworks of possibility expanded at exhilarating speed. Yet the new light fell only on the old darkness of the human condition. The physical laws of the universe were disclosed as conveying less warmth than a kindly Providence.
In the autocratic societies of Enlightenment Europe, it mattered not what the common people thought. They had their own hand-down folk culture; new things were for the learned, the élite, whose opinions both had influence and could be influenced. After the American and French revolutions, that situation changed. Nineteenth-century Europe seethed with populist movements. In democratic societies, the people have influence, and so must be influenced. It was necessary to disseminate the grand gloomy ideas which had originated through science (science itself had suddenly become democratic, not to mention riddled with socialists). The people must learn to rule as well as being ruled.
Means of dissemination of ideas were provided by technological developments. All things conspired to the swifter propagation of information, from mechanical inventions such as the development of the rotary press, to repeals of newspaper tax and the abolition of excise duty on paper, to the establishment of municipal libraries and public museums. The Victorian Age spawned penny encyclopaedias and many factual publications, whilst nourishing the growth of the novel which – in England at least – had appeared defunct in the decade when Queen Victoria came to the throne.
Grand gloomy ideas do not necessarily make headway in a period of euphoric advancement such as the early Victorians enjoyed. ‘We are on the side of Progress,’ said Macaulay. The novelists, chasing other goals than philosophy, established the novel as a great social force and as a social form. The forte of the novel was the portrayal of character striving with character within society. Balzac or Zola, Mrs Gaskell or Trollope, Dostoevsky or Turgenev, this was the novelist’s territory. And this, by the way, was the territory on which the newly arrived literary critics based their activities.
Complacency is always on the side of Progress. William Morris, near the end of the century, talks of ‘the Whig frame of mind, natural to the modern prosperous middle-class men, who, in fact, so far as mechanical progress is concerned, have nothing to ask for’. The first novelists to attempt evolutionary themes and essay the grand gloomy ideas were three autodidacts, Samuel Butler, Thomas Hardy and H. G. Wells.
To call Butler an autodidact is to exaggerate. He was of the prosperous middle class, his father being a canon of Lincoln, and he was educated at Shrewsbury and Cambridge. But he repudiated his father’s religion and influence, becoming virtually a different man by leaving home for New Zealand, where he farmed sheep. In New Zealand, he began his literary career, the fruits of which are noted for their anti-Christian and unorthodox flavour – foremost among them being Erewhon (1872).
One can see that Erewhon is not science fiction; one can also see how in crossing of some mysterious many ways it resembles science fiction. An imaginary journey, the crossing of some mysterious barrier (in this case mountains), and the discovery of another society with attendant marvels – these are the common stock alike of the medieval romance and of modern science fiction. Erewhon also has negative attributes which distance it from the ordinary novel. The central figure is solitary, a corollary of which is that there is no great emotional depth in the story; and human psychology is not a strong element of the design, which focuses instead on what is new, unknown. What is new and unknown is embodied in a series of brilliant ideas, brilliantly handled in a satirical way which reminds us somewhat of Peacock or, to look forward, Aldous Huxley. These ideas stem in the main from Darwinism, a subject to which Butler devoted several books.
Thomas Hardy attended Darwin’s funeral. His sombre imagination was fired by the misty stretches of landscape revealed by evolutionary thought.
We do not read Hardy for his ideas, thought they are present – the ideas of a dreamer more than an intellectual; we may read him as the novelist of countryside now largely vanished, though Hardy could scarcely distinguish one flower from another. In fact, what is most compelling in the Wessex novels is the struggle at all levels between traditional and disruptive new ways of thought. More directly, an evolutionary emphasis is present from the early novels to – and climaxing in – The Dynasts (1903), Hardy’s great para-historical drama with an evolving Immanent Will.
The case of H.G.Wells, who was taught by Darwin’s friend and ally, Thomas Huxley, is too familiar to need examination here. Like Hardy, Wells got his education where he could, and taught himself by teaching. His brilliant entry into the literary field marks the con- gruence of two grand gloomy ideas, evolution crossed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics: The Time Machine (1895). The Time Machine is distinctively science fiction in the way that The Dynasts distinctively is not. Indeed, it is science fiction in a way that much later science fiction is not – not only does it contain new ideas, but it combines them in a new way. Small wonder that it has been the exemplar of much that followed.
The Island of Dr Moreau, published the year after The Time Machine, shows Wells again worrying the bone of evolution. Wells himself pointed to its similarities with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And he says, ‘I have never been able to get away from life in the mass and life in general as distinguished from life in the individual experience, in any book I have ever written.’ This viewpoint of Man as Statistic, typical of many an SF writer, is encouraged by Malthusian thought. Wells and Hardy and Butler, being outside the swim of middle-class society, had little to lose by a new approach; it came naturally to them to express what was not received wisdom, and to propagate the unpopular. With the unpopular, Wells caught the popular ear.
These distinguished English writers were preceded by considerable writers from across the Channel. France was the first country of the Enlightenment; in Paris in 1771 was published a book which is in every way a product of its age – except that it is recognisably kin to science fiction.
While Cook was busy discovering Botany Bay, Boston was holding its Tea Party, and the first iron bridge was being built, Sebastien Mercier published his predictive work, L’An Deux Mille Quatre Cent Quarante. Mercier visualised a time, seven centuries ahead, when society had improved and perfected itself. The actual and the metaphorical Bastilles have vanished. This futuristic utopian fiction was translated and published in other European countries and eventually in the newly independent America.
How was it that the English by contrast took, even then, a much less sanguine view of the future? I cannot resist contrasting Mercier’s dream of the future as a place of fountains and fine buildings with the typically British preoccupation with disaster. Take for instance, an anonymous squib by one ‘Antonius’ published in Lloyd’s Evening Post for 25-28 November, 1771 (and never noticed again until now). It looks two centuries ahead to a ruinous Britain overcome by an American Empire.
Two Americans are guided round London by a poor Briton. The latter provides a running commentary as follows:
‘Yonder is a field of turnips, there stood the Palace of Whitehall; as to St James’s there are no traces of that left, it stood somewhere near that pond. Here stood that venerable pile of antiquity, Westminster Abbey, which was founded in the year 796; at the west end was the famous Chapel of Henry the Seventh, in which were interred most of our English Kings. That on the right is the remains of Queen Elizabeth’s tomb; that on the left, those of King William the Third; all the rest are swept away by time.
‘The whole church had been ornamented with monuments of Admirals, Generals, Poets, Philosophers, and others, two of which only we found legible, that of Locke and Newton, some being quite defaced, and others we could not come at on account of the ruins fallen in upon them. – What a melancholy sight, we exclaimed, that this venerable dome, dedicated to God, should be now converted into a stable!’
And so on. South Sea House is a mere jakes, its infamy well known. India House was destroyed one hundred and sixty years earlier, ‘for the blood they shed in India called for vengeance, and they were expelled the Country’.
Why this dark vision? Only a generation after Antonius, a girl of eighteen was writing the melancholy and perverse Frankenstein – an English girl of eighteen. Perhaps our national lack of hope has preserved the country from some of the excesses inflicted on the rest of the world in the last two centuries.
In the erudite and naive patchwork of creations we call science fiction, there is no other figure like Jules Verne; even his fellow-countrymen have not come to terms with him. Beyond pointing out that his immense Voyages Extraordinaires stands like an Enlightenment fortress which slowly crumbles into the darkness of the twentieth century, I prefer to mention two of his honourable predecessors who also precede H. G. Wells.
Restif de la Bretonne’s La Decouverte Australe par un Homme-Volant, was published in 1781. It is a major speculative work describing flying machines, airborne fleets, and a civilisation in the wilds of Australia (something no living Australian would dare postulate). In a later work, Les Posthumes (1802), Bretonne describes other planets and extra-terrestrial beings.
But in 1854, in Paris, a much more intensely science-fictional work was published: more science-fictional because it uses for its structure those grand gloomy ideas I have already mentioned. Charles Ischir Defontenay’s novel Star ou Psi de Cassiopée combines symbolism and science fiction; the result is rather like a painting by Gustave Moreau. Star is a sophisticated story concerning a remote solar system of which Star, oddly enough, is not the sun but the planet, the sole planetary body of a system containing three suns and some satellites.
The humanoid races living on Star exhibit the features of various conflicting evolutionary theories. The Savelces result from miscegenation between a god and a small worm; the Ponarbates derive from animal species which occasionally give birth to superior types; the Nemsedes are the fruit of a kind of spontaneous generation ‘born from the sour lime of the soil heated by electric air’, and so on. One of Defontenay’s tribes is hermaphrodite, anticipating similiar themes by Theodore Sturgeon and Ursula Le Guin by a century or more.
Defontenay’s tone might be described as religious but cheerful, which possibly explains why his remarkable book was forgotten for so long.
By the end of the nineteenth century, pessimism was coming back into fashion. The Oxford English Dictionary lists as one of the meanings of the word Future, ‘A condition in times to come different (esp. in a favourable sense) from the present.’ Significantly, the usage quoted comes from 1852. The optimism of that favourable sense of the word had evaporated forty years later, when Wells’s first novels appeared. But gone forever was the eighteenth-century attitude expressed by Pope, ‘Oh, blindness to the future, Kindly given.’ Nineteenth-century findings rendered it both necessary and possible to speculate on the future; knowing the worst was a new tool in the intellectual armoury.
It may be that part of the stigma still attaching to science fiction lay originally in the fact that the men who helped create it as a form of expression were themselves outsiders, or regarded themselves as outsiders; examination of, say, one hundred typical texts would probably reinforce the theme of isolation (prominent for instance in Frankenstein). Even in overpopulation novels, which proliferated in the sixties of this century, the solitary individual occurs, almost in defiance of his context.
Isolation is manifestly one of the problems liable to crop up on a newly discovered planet, where you can find yourself alone except for a computer, a captain who has got religion, and the ship’s cat. It was particularly to the concept of new planets that American SF writers turned when they entered the science fiction lists with the launching of the pulp magazines. This phenomenon is generally explained as the Quest for the Last Frontier. It is less glib to consider imaginary planets as evidence of the fear and attraction of isolation.
Just as Hollywood on the West Coast of the USA was largely run by émigrés – Hungarians and the like – so was the pulp industry, peddling dreams and traumas on the East Coast. The émigrés came from the over-populated cities of Europe to another over-populated American city. Many SF writers, editors, and publishers were strangers in a strange land, autodidacts like Hardy and Wells. Isaac Asimov is a case in point. Born in a suburb of Smolensk in Russia, he was brought over to the United States at the age of three. His family settled in Brooklyn; his father ran a candy store. By the age of nine, Asimov Jnr was reading SF and educating himself by it; since when, with great single-mindedness, he has been trying to educate the rest of us. There can be few sciences which have not escaped his net. (The abrupt uprooting in early childhood sets him in a class with Mary Shelley, Nerval, Wells, Stapledon, Ballard, Aldiss, and many others).
Although we can point to the new science-fictional planets as logical extensions of such fictitious lands as Laputa and Butler’s Erewhon, we should bear in mind scientific considerations as well as literary ones. True, as the terrestrial globe shrinks, it is increasingly difficult to convince readers of the probability of finding even a satirical utopia in some undiscovered nook. Arthur Conan Doyle’s siting of the Lost World in the Amazon was plausible in 1912 (Professor Challenger’s ‘journey to verify some conclusions of Wallace and Bates,’ and his discovery of scientifically accurate and astonishing water-colours, designedly remind us of Cook’s and Darwin’s expeditions to undiscovered regions). After World War I, the increasing range of flying machines made similar caches of evolutionary anachronisms less and less likely. Science, a creative part of man’s mind, banishes literature, another creative part. One could chart the banishment of Doyle’s dinosaurs down the scale of fiction, down the scale of likelihood, to the boys’ magazines of the thirties, to the comics of the forties and fifties, to the Hanna Barbera cartoons of the sixties, and from the Matto Grosso to inside Everest, and from Atlantis back to – for in the most desperate fantasies credulity is neither here nor there – South America.
As the imagination needed new planets for its proper exercise, the new tools of theoretical science could supply them. This is revealed in the chief literary use to which new planets were put in early science fiction. Satire and utopianism, favourite ploys of the eighteenth century or earlier, were no more. The new planets did not form stages on which man could enact his social problems; instead, they were themselves the centre of the action, working models of scientific thought.
For to imagine out the full implications of evolution, geology, Malthusianism, and the famous Second Law, one needs to construct either a time machine, as Wells did, or a planet that represents Earth in an earlier or later stage of its life history. Even existent planets were converted for this purpose. By common consent, Mars became a dried up senescent version of Earth, and Venus a model of earlier terrestrial history, hot and steamy, sweltering under a Jurassic dream. Both models totally ignored astronomical fact, but fulfilled the need to act out in imagination current scientific theories.
The other element that assisted in the model-making was Infinite Lay Time. That also was a nineteenth-century invention. All time machines are ILT vehicles. Before their invention by sceptical theoretical scientists and mathematicians, anyone venturing back in time to 4004 BC would have banged his head on solid rock. The new speculative element, which rendered time immense, allowed the time traveller to go back far beyond page one of Genesis or forward beyond Armageddon to the ultimate heat death of the universe. SF writers had the job of making both accessible to the lay imagination. No-one else would touch the daunting task.
The connections between our world of today and the Enlightenment are now faint, erased by the horrors of our century, two world wars and the long-planned, long-term massacres of millions of people by Hitler and Stalin and their willing agents. Yet there are echoes. Europe has shrunk again, and is threatened by a new kind of Turk, though we are hardly likely to finance a new Prince Eugène.
Science fiction is here to stay, or will stay as long as we can at least speak of progress and dare to look at the future. In the West SF writers are still not mouthpieces of the state; one can see for them a unique function as disseminators of philosophical and scientific thought. Writers like Wells and Huxley excelled in that role, as did Olaf Stapledon, with his imaginative transformations of combined evolutionary and cosmological theory.
But the great commercial success of science fiction in the seventies diminishes the possibility that it will be treated even by its practitioners with proper seriousness. Money is not the enemy, but the greed for money. SF has become a sort of cultural reflex like the mother-in-law joke, used to sell cars and biscuits. Every time it is so used, it is drained of challenging ideas. Eventually it may become so trivial, so light, that it will sink below the intellectual horizon.
Paradoxically, this new commercial success comes at a time when its prime base – the grand gloomy ideas I have described – has worn thin, as genre material always does. As it becomes or tends to become less a literary genre, so – paradoxically again – it is being greatly taken up by universities, especially in the States, and the first international congress of SF critics has been held in Palermo (for SF is now an international pursuit, endowed by UNESCO).
But, science fiction has always been contradictory, and its best creators of a sturdily independent kind. This is perhaps the time of greatest potential for them and for the genre.
Even in a popular film like Star Wars, admittedly a mammoth with the brains of a gnat, one perceives at least latent thought. Although Star Wars was widely condemned by SF writers for its triviality, one can see how easily the idea of the Force as a spiritual weapon, rather than Robin Hood’s stave, could have been developed and deepened. The rebels would then have been fighting against the evil of the Empire with values on their side with which a general public would readily have identified; it could have entered scenes upon which, instead, it merely gazed.
The Force is a sort of corrupt version of the Samurai code. To have inserted the true thing with all its ritual of fasting and self-discipline and chivalric intent into the film would have increased immensely the film’s significance without spoiling the pace. Admittedly, Luke Skywalker would then have become less of a Disney kid; it is not sufficient to have togged him up with a shorty Roman toga instead of giving him a character.
Star Wars was pretty, but underestimated its audience’s intelligence. One of the lessons of the Enlightenment is that people are, on the whole, glad to learn and take pleasure in knowledge. Criticism should never be too prescriptive, but my hope is that science fiction will retain its old magic, and its sturdy if gloomy philosophical basic.
James Blish and the Mathematics of Knowledge (#u769fe0b6-0aa0-515d-8526-25f1e4638119)
We did not have the time to learn
everything that we wanted to know
Retma’s epitaph for Man in A Clash of Cymbals
The science fiction of James Blish presents us with a number of pleasurable dichotomies. Under the cloak of technological activity, he is a visionary of an old-fashioned kind, able, like Blake, to hold infinity in his hand. Such visionaries usually speak out against technology; but Blish saw in technology a chance to bring us nearer to the seat of knowledge, which – I hope to show – he equated with wisdom. Technology and the advance of science, in Blish’s view, bring us nearer to the ends and beginnings of things which loom so largely in Blishian cosmologies.
Windows on eternity open in all his novels. I knew Blish well for several years before his death in 1975 and he often spoke fondly of his early novel, Fallen Star (The Frozen Year, US title). A window on eternity opens early in that novel:
‘My post gave me a direct view of the magnificent photograph, about four by six, which was hanging over Ellen’s desk. It looked like a star caught in the act of blowing up – as, in miniature, it was; the photo was an enlargement from a cosmic-ray emulsion-trace, showing a heavy primary nucleus hitting a carbon atom in the emulsion and knocking it to bits, producing a star of fragment-traces and a shower of more than two hundred mesons.
Nobody with any sense of the drama implicit in a photograph like that – a record of the undoing of one of the basic building blocks of the universe, by a bullet that had travelled unknowable millions of years and miles to effect the catastrophe – could have resisted asking for a closer look.’
In asking for a closer look at the photograph, Julian Cole becomes involved as a journalist on the International Geophysical Year expedition to the Arctic. A member of the expedition, Joseph Wentz, dies, and a short oration is made over his dead body by Farnsworth, the leader of the expedition. The oration includes these words: ‘If You [God] … exist, and if You are still thinking about men, think of Joe Wentz. He admired Your fine workmanship in the stars, and never reproached You for spoiling him.’
Another member of the expedition responds angrily, ‘It is proven: He never punishes crime; He cares nothing for stars; why should He care about man?’ Much of Blish’s work is devoted to answering this question. Is there a God? Does he care? Can we achieve answers to these vital questions by pushing science (knowledge) to its extremes?
Juxtaposed, these questions form a central riddle, the nature of which changes slightly throughout Blish’s long career. Blish never satisfactorily answers the riddle himself. This may imply a failure as a theoretical novelist, but the riddle is often embodied in an image of great power; this is his success as a poet. The riddle is given form in Fallen Star, for instance, by the little pebble which Farnsworth embeds in an ordinary ice cube.
The pebble is a tektite fallen to Earth from the region of the asteroid belt, and consists of sedimentary rock. The implications of this find are tremendous. An asteroidal protoplanet once existed which supported oceans for a long period. So its climate must have been warmer than Mars; it must have had an atmosphere. A later discovery carries these theories further. There was life on the planet. And it was destroyed by the Martians within the period of Man’s span on Earth. There has been War in Heaven. As Farnsworth says – ‘Cosmic history in an ice cube!’
These and similar preoccupations explain why Blish felt such admiration for C. S. Lewis, to whose memory Black Easter is dedicated. Yet Blish is of what we may term the Campbell Generation; his work bears at least superficial resemblances to the other writing forged on John W. Campbell’s anvil. The Okie series, for example, gathered into book form as Cities in Flight, ran in serial form over a number of years in Campbell’s Astounding. Beneath the galactic gallivantings, however, lies something more hard-headed than anything in Heinlein, more intellectual than anything in Asimov, and more immense than anything in Van Vogt. Moreover, that something has little in common with the two SF writers Blish most admired, Henry Kuttner and Cyril Kornbluth, for he rarely attempts the romantic and satiric modes in which Kuttner and Kornbluth are most successful.
In their spirit of enquiry, Blish’s novels are centrally science fictional. It is in the direction of that enquiry that Blish’s originality lies. We can only hope that some critic will come along and investigate his whole considerable oeuvre for us, revealing Blish’s true stature. I hope to point to a few lines of enquiry in this essay.
One main topic in the Astounding to which Blish contributed his early stories may be summed up in that striking phrase of Winston Churchill’s: ‘The Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science.’ Campbell’s writers, whatever they might profess on the surface, were ambivalent regarding the virtues of the future world to which they saw themselves progressing as the outriders of culture. Time and time again, their stories dramatise experiments which – like those of Wernher von Braun in real life – metaphorically aim for the stars but hit London. Only in the stories of Isaac Asimov do we glimpse some kind of ordered and rational future. Yet, in the most popular of all sagas to emerge from Campbell’s forge, Asimov’s Foundation, (the title of that civilisation which Hari Seldon must preserve against the forces of decline) culture has nothing to do with the arts and humanities: it signifies merely an extrapolated twentieth-century technology which encases Trantor in metal, opposed by a barbarism which rides in spaceships.
Blish’s conception of culture and of science is more profound: he sees beneath them to their warring source. He perceived how every civilisation is dominated by a few major ideas and how these ideas become gradually outmoded, dooming the culture concerned; the fate of the Martians in Fallen Star is not that their planet has lost its atmosphere, but that they ‘have gone frozen in the brains’. Blish appreciated the seminal value of the pre-Classical culture in Greece, and dismissed out of hand Campbell’s assertion that ‘Homer was a barbarian’. Ideas infused from other sources can regenerate older cultures, as is demonstrated in Dr Mirabilis, the biography of the ‘miraculous doctor’, Roger Bacon, over which Blish laboured so long. The same seminal thought moved Blish to yoke four totally distinct books, A Case of Conscience, Black Easter, The Day After Judgement, and Mirabilis, together as an uncomfortable tetralogy entitled After Such Knowledge. His obsession with the true scientific nature of cultures is dramatised in The Seedling Stars which owes much to Olaf Stapledon. There an Adapted Man is not so much a man as an Idea from Earth, inserted into an alien environment to regenerate it (the reverse of the situation in Fallen Star).
The Seedling Stars is ultimately crude because the grand experiment of seeding stars takes little account of the feelings of the living beings forced to participate in the experiment, despite the moralising about the venture which goes on. Blish was interested in morality as a consciousness structure, while singularly lacking conventional moral tone. Individual lives rarely moved him. What concerned him was connecting together incompatible structures; he had come to believe, through Oswald Spengler, that there were no eternal verities, not even in the mathematics which is the basis of culture; hence his pre-occupation with eschatology.
A passage in Spengler’s Decline of the West must have attracted Blish’s attention, and certainly is relevant to the present day.
‘The modern mathematic, though “true” only for the Western spirit, is undeniably a master-work of that spirit; and yet to Plato it would have seemed a ridiculous and painful aberration from the path leading to the “true” – to wit, the Classical – mathematic. And so with ourselves. Plainly, we have almost no notion of the multitude of great ideas belonging to other Cultures that we have suffered to lapse because our thought with its limitations has not permitted us to assimilate them, or (which comes to the same thing) has led us to reject them as false, superfluous, and nonsensical.’
Our culture, sensing that the numbers in the Renaissance hour-glass are running out, is now trying belatedly to derive notations from other cultures previously ignored. Hence such manifestations as Tao Physics – and possibly SF itself.
Throughout Blish’s writing, we find two predominant preoccupations: that some culture or phase of culture is coming to an end (generally with a new beginning implied in that end) and that fresh ideas transfigure culture. Both these preoccupations find resolution in concepts of number. What excites him is not the individual – how could it, given those preoccupations – but the alembic of mathematics.
So his books conclude with cryptic sentences, the like of which never was on land or sea.
‘Earth isn’t a place. It’s an idea.’
God is dead.
‘And so, by winning all, all have I lost.’
Creation began.
Then he, too, was gone, and the world was ready to begin.
This last is the final line of one of Blish’s less appreciated novels, A Torrent of Faces, written with Norman L. Knight and, like Dr Mirabilis, a slow growth. It concerns – so the author tells us – a utopia of over-population. Blish did not regard this as a contradiction in terms. Again, numbers exercised their appeal. He says, ‘Our future world requires one hundred thousand cities with an average population of ten million people each. This means that there would have to be seven such cities in an area as small as Puerto Rico, about twelve to sixteen miles apart, if the cities are spread evenly all over the world in a checkerboard pattern.’ This culture survives only because a large portion of mankind lives under the oceans.
A Torrent of Faces is a cascade of figures. Every conversation seems to flow with them. As Kim and Jothen fly towards the mountain range of Chicago, she tells him, ‘Somewhere inside is the headquarters of the Civic Medical Services. I was born there. Every day approximately fifteen thousand babies are born there. The nine outlying regional centres produce about the same number daily …’ And so on. It is all rather like the scene at the end of A Clash of Cymbals where, heading for the collapse of the universe at the metagalactic centre of the universe, Hazelton borrows Amalfi’s slide-rule to do a few setting-up exercises.
This is not just a ploy to baffle us with prestidigitation; the power of numbers is a real thing for Blish. In A Clash of Cymbals, it creates a new universe. Amalfi, the hero of the Okie saga, becomes the godhead, the very substance of the new universe (‘the elements of which he and the suit were composed flash into pleasure …’). Never was life everlasting achieved on such a scale.
This apocalyptic idea of one state of being leading to another is fundamental to a number of Blish’s novels and stories: one system of thought similarly supersedes another. Poor scientific Roger Bacon, arriving at Westminster, occupies a room foul with marsh gas from the sewer below; when he ignites it and blows himself up, he believes it to have been a visitation by the devil.
Blish’s work as a whole is remarkable for the visitations it numbers from both devils and angels. They were perhaps his way of injecting a conflicting irrational idea into the rationalism of Campbellian SF. Such creatures earn themselves a book title – The Night Shapes. This is not one of Blish’s best novels; perhaps Darkest Africa, with uneasy references to Rider Haggard – though E. R. Burroughs is nearer to the mark – suited the Blishian temperament less well than the Arctic. A terrible valley, likened to Eden, ‘burns out’ (and so becomes Hell?), releasing the night shapes. ‘The night shapes aren’t animals, or men, or demons, even to begin with. They’re the ideas of evil for which those real things only stand. The real things are temporary. They can be hunted. But the shapes are inside us. They’ve always lived there. They always will.’
The context does not support the premise. But the premise of such night shapes often supported Blish.
Not only did he see them as convenient shorthand for an alien system of thought intruding itself on the cartesian universe, he had a markedly individual belief in Good and Evil. Through his windows on eternity he watched the Fall re-enacted. His purest version of the Fall is played out on Lithia, the planet in A Case of Conscience, the first volume of After Such Knowledge. That ponderous title, After Such Knowledge, is a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ Nobody earns forgiveness in Blish’s worlds; the math is against it. Religion’s no help. Even the Devil has to suffer by taking up the burdens of God at the end of The Day After Judgement.
Not that Blish believes in or asks us to believe in actual devils. But he has an interest in them which some might find excessive. He likes to hold the proposition open, if only as one of ‘the multitude of great ideas belonging to other cultures’ (devils being far from a Christian prerogative); perhaps he teased himself by the quotation from C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters used in Black Easter: ‘There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive or unhealthy interest in them.’
